Steve Bannon is our favorite felonious Epstein supervillain. He’s actually fun to talk to and has brilliant media instincts (flooding the zone with shit – his great insight – most certainly works). As the information sewer overflows, it becomes impossible to keep track of rampant abuses of power, open-air corruption and the networks that keep the sordid operation going. The shit-flood and the scoop-obsessed news cycle work together like a bomb going off and burying the witnesses.

Sometimes it pays to stop and dig around. In the age of the Epstein cover-up, it behooves us not to forget the unanswered questions.

Today we will revisit the career of Pete Hegseth’s top aide, former New York mob attorney Tim Parlatore.

Parlatore – born Timothy Payne – attended Brooklyn Law, like Trump’s better-known guard dog and personal lawyer, Acting Attorney General Todd “Whiteout” Blanche. Not Yale. Not Harvard. These guys might not be Roy Cohn, but they came up cold and hard through the same Gotham legal networks that enabled Donald Trump’s game for decades.

Parlatore got his start in criminal defense law at the knee of Bruce Cutler, mobster John Gotti’s famously combative lawyer. His first case that garnered media attention was in defense of a Marine Corps reservist and Iraq War veteran charged with animal cruelty for kicking his girlfriend’s dog. It’s not clear why he changed his last name from Payne, but a guy named “Parlatore” probably jived better with the likes of Gambino family “made man” Joseph Sclafani and Bonanno family soldier Anthony “Skinny” Santoro. (For more on Parlatore’s curious path, read national security writer Seth Hettena here.)

At the Pentagon, Parlatore has distinguished himself by drafting unconstitutional restrictions on the press while simultaneously propping up his flop-sweating former client, Pete Hegseth. He got to know the philandering, boozing Fox News host while helping settle a roofie rape accusation against him. Before that, Parlatore had won virility-obsessed Hegseth’s loyalty by successfully defending a truly psycho Navy Seal charged with war crimes in Iraq (fellow SEALs alleged that the man bragged about killing women and children and boasted of a “kill rate” of 10 to 20 people a day).

But Parlatore is not just a Pentagon macher. He is one of the top guardians Donald Trump has relied on to protect his dirtiest secrets.

Which brings us to Epstein.

Parlatore is in the Epstein files, representing the MCC guard who accompanied Epstein’s body from his jail cell to the hospital where he was pronounced dead – one of the first people to communicate with the duty guards responsible for watching over the incarcerated international trafficker.

But Parlatore also has another much deeper Epstein connection. He boarded the Trump train when post-presidential Donald needed “killer lawyers” to defend him against federal charges tied to the theft of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. A month after taking that case, Parlatore brought Darren Indyke into his law firm – yes, the same Darren Indyke who spent decades serving as Jeffrey Epstein’s personal lawyer.

This is the sequence of events: In September 2022, Parlatore publicly defended Trump on TV after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago; in October 2022, he hired Indyke; by November 2022, Parlatore was formally part of Trump’s legal team handling the classified documents investigation.

Parlatore later stated that he personally oversaw and organized searches for classified documents at other Trump residences. He has scoffed at reporters who find the timing and fact of his hiring Epstein’s lawyer odd. After all, he was just giving the poor guy a break.

We still don’t know what Trump took or why. The indictment charged him with 37 federal counts – later increased to 40 – for willfully retaining classified documents, conspiring to obstruct justice, and making false statements after leaving office. The details are sketchy, but alarming. Trump made off with material related to nuclear information, U.S. and foreign military capabilities, contingency attack plans, intelligence sources and methods and other highly compartmentalized national security details.

We may never find out more because a Trump-appointed Florida tool, AKA Judge Aileen Cannon, tossed the case, sealed the record, and muzzled everyone under the threat of criminal charges.

Congressional Democrats who attended a closed briefing with special prosecutor Jack Smith could only sputter hints as to what they’d seen afterward. The Trump-retained materials were among “the most protected materials held by the federal government,” including a document so sensitive that access had reportedly been limited to “only six people” in the U.S. government.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said a public hearing would have been “absolutely devastating to the president.” One box of documents had allegedly been scanned onto a Trump aide’s laptop and uploaded to the cloud, which he argued created an entirely separate set of security concerns.

Raskin also said investigators found documents “pertinent to [Trump’s] business interests,” which he pointed out, raised questions about why the records were retained in the first place.

None of this should surprise anyone. Donald Trump has never been known to leave easy money on the table – from the post-Great Recession Trump University scam to the small vendors in Atlantic City he bankrupted by stiffing them for pianos and carpets at his doomed casinos, and now the latest, “Trump phones.”

Fleecing the government is also a family tradition. Daddy Fred Trump profiteered off of World War II GI Bill construction money, the Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud, Donald Trump evaded federal taxes for at least a decade, and now his conflicted son is making billion dollar deals with the Pentagon.

Back to Mr. Parlatore. Now that the depth and breadth of Epstein’s international networking and backchannel connections to U.S. government agencies are becoming known, the presence of an Epsteinworld insider like Indyke in the vicinity of the stolen documents case becomes even more interesting.

Before Tim Parlatore picked him up, Indyke had reportedly been laying low in South Florida, banking multimillion dollar profits from Epstein’s trust and working as a real estate agent. Parlatore says he felt sorry for him, and that Indyke assured his benefactor that the FBI had already interviewed him and found him blameless. Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t really hold up. In fact, several years prior, a 2020 settlement with Deutsche Bank noted that Indyke withdrew $800,000 between 2013 and 2017 in $7,500 increments – an amount clearly chosen to deliberately skirt the reporting triggers that would attract attention.

Indyke has since said the money was for “meals, gifts, and gratuities,” though DOJ files suggest Epstein’s global trafficking business was peaking during those same years. Any presumption of Indyke’s ignorance further eroded as the Files revealed him running numerous shell companies for Epstein. And COURIER recently discovered that Indyke lied to the House Oversight Committee about a $3 million house he received as a gift.

Darren Indyke’s sole qualification as a lawyer for the Parlatore Law Group is a career spent managing the legal and financial affairs of a global sex trafficker with deep ties to American and foreign power networks. Indyke possesses the kind of unique “skills” and knowledge that would undeniably come in handy if and when the Epstein cover-up gets too close to Trump.

The cover-up is vast – a vault of secrets going back decades and involving some of the most powerful men in the world. Epstein knew what those secrets were worth. Trump certainly does too.

The Parlatore Law Group, with attorneys playing both sides, should be on the House Oversight Committee’s radar.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow